U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/066,465, titled “Method and Apparatus to Dynamically Provide Web Content Resources in an Internet Portal,” filed Jan. 30, 2002, and related U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/066,368, titled “Method to Dynamically Determine a User's Language for the Internet,” filed Jan. 30, 2002, describe methods and apparatus for accessing content by a user in a preferred format. The systems of these patent applications for the most part provide indirect access to the content. The user does not directly access the content. Instead, the user access is via portal sites, which act as intermediaries between the user and the content, the types of content the user prefers. The portal site accesses the content, structures it for display to the user, and then presents the information to the user in a particular way.
In addition, these patent applications do not address the question of security. Instead, these patent applications assume that the user has already been authenticated or “checked out” by the portal site and has permission to view the content.
Sometimes, however, a user will want to access content without going through presentation of the information in a particular way coming from portal site. Unless the user has a mechanism to directly access the content, this is not possible, and limits the user's ability to use the content.
Accordingly, a need remains for a way to provide a user with access to secure content without having to go through the presentation of information in a particular way from a portal site, to address these and other problems associated with the prior art.